


Love Is

by trixya4ever



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence, Coming of Age, Fluff, M/M, Smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 17:58:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12137994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trixya4ever/pseuds/trixya4ever
Summary: When Brian made the move away from Milwaukee for college, he knew it would be a turning point in his life. Then he stumbled across a drag queen in a Boston nightclub, and realized he had underestimated how much everything was going to change.





	Love Is

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I've been away from writing for a couple of years now, but this fandom has pulled me back in! Hopefully I haven't forgotten how everything works here. This is a reimagining of how things could have been different for Katya and Trixie if they had met during college instead of on Drag Race. There was a post on Tumblr at some point about Trixie in Season Seven that said she looked like the guy who would carry her boyfriend's drag stuff around backstage, which influenced this somewhat!

October 2003

 

The club was loud. Brian had never been inside a real club before, and at first he was on edge that someone was going to grab him, demand to see his ID and then laugh in his face at the crudely made up fake he had stashed in his wallet. He shouldn’t have been surprised when no one checked for ID at the seediest club he’d come across in Boston. It had been a relief nonetheless, and now he had a vodka soda clutched to his chest to avoid getting it thrown over his clothes, and he was about to see his first drag show.

 

Brian had made the switch from his music major to the musical theatre program just a few weeks before, and tonight he’d been invited out with all of the gays and the girls on his course to introduce him properly to the group.

_“You’ve never seen a drag show? Really?” Josh had said when someone had asked Brian about it after a workshop the day before. Josh was a Junior, only two year or so older than Brian maybe, but so far he’d treated Brian like someone’s kid brother who needed keeping in line. He liked to make fun of Brian’s Wisconsin accent and the fact that he came from a small town, that he wasn’t used to living in a city like Boston even though he was already halfway through his first semester at college._

_“No. There weren’t a lot of drag shows in Milwaukee,” Brian had said._

_“It doesn’t sound like there was a lot of anything in Milwaukee,” Josh had said, and there had been a handful of snickers from the others in the group. Brian had bristled. When he was surrounded by catty gays he wondered why he’d been so excited to meet so many more of them at college. Maybe Milwaukee wasn’t the most exciting city, but it was his home and he didn’t appreciate all these New England WASPs making fun of it._

_“We’ll educate you, baby Brian. Unless going to a club with us is too grown up for you?” Josh had said and ruffled Brian’s hair. Brian had let him, forcing a laugh, since he knew that if he tried to protest then it would only encourage him. For some reason Josh seemed popular within the course, so Brian was trying to play nice until he found his feet. But too many years of being towed around by his older brother and his friends had left him tired of being treated like a little kid. He’d been stupid to let slip that he’d only turned 18 just before moving to Boston._

 

Tonight he was going to shake the reputation as the baby of the group. He’d done well so far, getting in without any problems and passing on the cocktails some of the girls had been ordering in favor of a more respectable drink. It was a world away from sharing beers with his friends back in someone’s basement in high school, or even passing around solo cups in his dorm room. He felt grown up.

 

Most of the group he’d arrived with had scattered across the small dance floor. Brian didn’t mind. He could see Josh and some of the other gays hovering around the bar, and a few of the girls who came to the club regularly had pushed through the crowd to get closer to the small elevated stage at the other end of the room. Brian considered going to join them, but it seemed like it was mostly girls and he’d rather stay closer to the bar in case anyone interesting appeared.

 

He was three drinks in by the time the first drag queen came out on stage. She- he? Brian settled on she- was little and bouncy, black makeup smeared around big blue eyes. Brian watched her banter with the crowd and when she traded barbs with one of the girls he’d arrived with he found himself laughing at how effortlessly she shut her down.

 

She was pretty. Feminine. Brian was no expert in makeup, but they’d always had to do their own for his high school productions so he was well-versed enough to see how clumsily hers was applied. She looked like a woman despite all of that, or maybe because of it. The too dark contour and red lipstick on her teeth were endearing as she flounced around the small stage. She talked with a Russian accent too strong and too exaggerated to be real. Brian liked that she laughed harder than anyone else at her own jokes.

 

She kept coming back out between performers. Brian was enthralled. Some of the drag queens looked like women, like her, like _Katya_ , she’d said her name and he’d mouthed it back, unable to help himself, whose big red smile against her pale makeup kept drawing his attention. Some did not, and didn’t seem like they wanted to, and that fascinated him. Before now he’d only had a hazy idea of what drag was, and his world was expanding before his eyes.

 

Katya bounced back out onto the stage after the other drag queens had finished. Some guy had bought Brian another drink and tried to talk to him, but Katya had appeared again and he lost interest in anything that wasn’t her. He kept missing his mouth with the straw while she performed and had to toss it to the ground, drinking straight from the glass so he didn’t have to miss a moment. She was moving around to a song in Russian, punctuating every line with a wiggle of her hips or a silly flourish or a wink towards her audience. At one point their eyes met, and Brian thought her smile got bigger. Then she dropped into the splits and his brain immediately short circuited.

 

Brian was gay, _gay_ gay, gold star gay, but that didn’t mean he was blind.

 

Then the show was over, and Brian was drunk. Katya had danced off stage with fistfuls of dollars to show for her night and Brian was annoyed he hadn’t joined the girls deeper in the crowd so he could tip her. Next time. For now he weaved through the crowd as it spread out, looking for anyone he’d arrived with. One of the girls was supposed to be driving him home, and he couldn’t remember the way back to his dorms from here. He ended up circling back to the bar, leaning heavily against it. The crowd had already thinned out but he couldn’t see anyone he recognized. It didn’t help much that things were suddenly blurry, and he couldn’t pick out anyone’s faces. He couldn’t even remember who was supposed to be driving him, Jennifer or Sarah or Becky or Lisa, they had all merged into one in his brain, a giggly mass.

 

“You look like you need this,” The girl behind the bar said, pushing a glass towards him. He squinted at it and she laughed at him, “It’s water. Drink it!”

 

The water helped somewhat. Things got a little less blurry, but Brain still couldn’t see anyone he was looking for. By this point he would have even been happy to see Josh, but no luck. He was worried now that maybe they’d left without him. Maybe they had been hazing him all along, letting him loose to get drunk and lost before abandoning him to find his own way home.

 

The urge to pee distracted him from his panic. He pushed through the crowd of people dancing to find the bathrooms off a side hallway. The smell was bad but combined with the way the music was quieter there it helped him sober up more.

 

He came out of the bathrooms and pushed through the door to the club. Or, through the door he thought led to the club. Instead he found himself in a back room, even darker than the club itself.

 

“Hello,” An unfamiliar voice said from a few feet away. Brian reached for the door handle behind him and heard, “No, wait! I need you to help me.”

 

He looked more closely and saw it was Katya from before. She looked smaller and he looked down and saw she’d lost her heels. There were runs in her stockings around her ankles, and one stretched across her knee.

 

“You’re getting the behind the scenes view,” she said. Brian realized he had been staring.

 

“I…..”

 

“Got lost? It always happens. Cmere, I need you to help me,” she said again, waving him over. “I’m not going to bite,” she said when he didn’t move, “well. Unless you’re into that. I’m not going to kinkshame you.” She sounded different. She had dropped the phony Russian accent and spoke with a Boston one now, although it wasn’t as strong as Josh’s or anyone else he’d met from the city. He could see tracks in her makeup at her forehead where it looked like sweat had distorted it.

 

“What do you need?” he asked. Her smile in response was huge. He could see in the dim light how overdrawn her lips were. One of her eyelashes drooped a little bit at the corner. She was still pretty. Without her heels she was even smaller than she had looked on stage, and she had to look up at him.

 

“Someone put my bag up on the top shelf. Can you get it?” she asked. She pointed to the shelves lining the wall beside them, specifically a duffel bag on the highest shelf.

 

“Here,” Brian said, grabbing onto it by its strap hanging off the shelf. His knees buckled a little at the weight of it as he pulled it down, but he recovered quickly. Katya still laughed at him.

 

“You’re strong,” she said appreciatively, while Brian awkwardly held her bag in his arms.

 

“What do you have in here?” he asked. Katya spun on her heel and started walking in the opposite direction to the way Brian had come in. Whatever she had used to pad herself out had to have slipped, because one hip was slightly wider than the other as she walked away from him.

 

“Outfits! I like to bring choices for myself,” She called out to him over her shoulder. Brian put the bag’s strap over his shoulder and followed her. He had sobered up some more now and was dimly aware of his chances of finding his ride dissipating the longer he hung around here, but he stayed with Katya nonetheless.

 

“I found a beefcake to help me,” she said as she walked into another room, pointing back at Brian. None of the other people in the room paid him any attention, all in various stages in and out of drag. It was strange to see them without their wigs but makeup untouched, or in tshirts and sweatpants with long wigs over their shoulders.

 

“You can put that here. Thanks!” Katya said to him, pointing to a free chair near the center of the room. Brian let it drop from his shoulder beside the chair.

 

“I should…..” He took a step backwards towards the door, feeling out of place.

 

“What’s your name, beefcake?” Katya asked. She propped herself against the chair but didn’t sit down or touch her bag.

 

“Brian,” Brian said.

 

“Brian?” Katya repeated, and he nodded. “Beefcake Brian. You seem kind of drunk, Beefcake Brian. Do you want me to call you a cab?” she asked.

 

“Yes please,” He said. He didn’t have his own cell to use, and he realized how useful it would be to own one now.

 

Maybe Katya didn’t own one either, because she went to someone sitting on the other side of the room and opened their bag. She produced a small flip phone and opened it up.

 

“Hi! Can I order a cab to 79 Broadway? Yeah, Jacques. Five minutes?” She put a hand on Brian’s bicep and squeezed, then pointed to the door. “Great! We’ll be outside.”

 

She led Brian through a series of hallways and he couldn’t tell if they really were confusing or if he was still more drunk than he had realized. Katya’s hand stayed on his arm, pointed fake nails digging into his skin through his shirt. She smelled nice, like the perfume his best friend back home used. He felt a flicker of home sickness for her, but then they were outside and Katya was turned towards him, smiling.

 

“Smoke?” she asked, producing cigarettes and a lighter from somewhere in her tight outfit.

 

Brian considered saying yes but then thought about choking on smoke and spluttering in front of her and shook his head.

 

“Do you know where you’re going, Beefcake Brian?” she asked, putting a cigarette between her teeth and struggling to light it with her clawlike nails. She frowned, teeth digging into the cigarette, and picked off three of the nails to hold the lighter better. They pinged to the ground by Brian’s feet.

 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” He told her. He was having a sudden realization about where he was, outside an unfamiliar club in a city he still didn’t know well, still kind of drunk and hanging out with a drag queen. It was certainly something he didn’t think would have happened if he’d stayed in Milwaukee.

 

“The dorms?” Katya asked knowingly, and he nodded. “You look young. First time here?”

 

“Everyone says that. They call me Baby Brian, the people I came here with,” Brian said. He had no idea why he’d just confessed something that embarrassed him so much. He must still be drunker than he had thought.

 

“Baby Brian,” Katya said. She was grinning. “Beefcake Brian. Baby Beefcake Brian? I like it. All the Bs. Will I see you around here again, Beefcake Brian?”

 

“Yeah,” he said. He definitely wanted to come back again, just to see Katya perform.

 

“Good,” Katya said. She finished her cigarette and replaced her hand on his arm. It was the hand with all of her nails intact, and she ran it up and down his bicep. “Your cab will be here soon,” she said. Her voice was lower now in an almost sultry way. She looked up at him from under heavy black eyelashes.

 

“Thanks for calling for it,” Brian said. Katya smiled wolfishly at him, all teeth.

 

“Thanks for carrying my bag. Come here,” she said. Her other hand wrapped around the back of his neck and she pulled his head down. Her lips were smoother than any of the guys he’d ever kissed before, and he could taste smoke on her tongue. He went to put his hand on her hair but stopped at the last second when he remembered her wig, so spread his palm across the small of her back instead, pulling her closer.

 

The kiss lasted several long minutes. Katya pulled back from him at the sound of a car approaching. Brian wiped his mouth and there were streaks of red on his palm.

 

“Thanks, Beefcake,” Katya said. Her hand on his arm turned him towards the cab, and he grabbed at the door. Once he was inside she shut the door behind him.

 

Brian felt much more sober now. He told the driver the location of his dorms, and as they drove away he turned in his seat to watch Katya light up another cigarette, still standing on the street in her stocking feet.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I would love any feedback!


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